5 ms·

What's depressingly hilarious is that employees generally hated this behavior, because useful information would often disappear before you were done with it. Fo

by jefftk 4y ago

What's depressingly hilarious is that employees generally hated this behavior, because useful information would often disappear before you were done with it. For example, someone answers your question on Friday after you've left and when you check messages on Monday it's gone. Or you'd want to refer to something from a conversation a few days ago and it'd been deleted as well.

shadowgovt 4y ago
I don't have a horse in this race (anymore), but in the abstract I would love if government aligned incentives so that it was more painful for companies to toss records that should have been retained than to retain records that are damaging to them in hindsight, which they were legally allowed at some point to toss. For precisely the reason you indicated.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Then companies will just get rid of chat tools because informal discussions can be turned to fit any narrative. 'wow, Bob picked the worst possible way to solve xyz' negligence, knowingly having incompetent developers. You yourself said Bob's solutions were the worst possible. 'looking back, we should have implemented XYZ differently but we are stuck with that implementation now' can be about something harmless but blown so out of proportion in court.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    This site is crazy. I get downvoted for posting insurance company training regarding chat and get downvoted. I guess you all just run a company without worrying about having insurance? Are you people who downvoted in IT and the liaison with the insurance company?
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Companies can't get rid of chat tools anymore than previous bureaucracies could stop using paper. Operating at current scale requires digital communication. If they tried to cut that off, they'd discover that things stopped working. Twitter gave us an example of that just this week: https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musks-twitter https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musk...
    - bluGill 4y ago
      True, but saving paper was a lot more work. Most paper memos got read and put into the trash as you didn't have space to save it. Even if there wasn't a review everything saved policy you still did just because it was sitting in your office until you got rid of it. Of course when something did have to be saved you gave it to your secretary to file and wouldn't review it latter to see if it should go, but if it stayed in your office it didn't last much longer than you needed it.
    - andromeduck 4y ago
      People can just voice/video call and write memos.
      - wpietri 4y ago
        Can they? I mean, I grant the theoretical possibility. In the same way that they could in theory only meet in person. But I just provided you with a counterexample of that not actually happening. The reason people use things like Slack is because they're way more efficient than setting up meetings to discuss things. So I think in the long term, a company like Google ruling out chat would be significantly handicapped vs their competitors in terms of information flow, response time, and ability to iterate.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        Paper records like memos are subject to evidence preservation rules as well.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > can be about something harmless but blown so out of proportion in court. That's the entire point of a court, to find correct context and proportion. Judges are not idiots and they don't like being mislead. If you blow things out of proportion, and your opponents can put up a counterargument, it will cost you.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Just let the plaintiff or prosecuter decide what evidence they would have liked to find and instruct the jury to assume it was found. This would never happen again anywhere.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    The issue here is that companies are not generally required to retain a records indefinitely, and if something was deleted as part of a standard retention policy (instead of specifically because of its contents) the normal "assume the worst" policy doesn't apply. Which is, I think, why lawyers are excited about a default of having a short retention period. On the other hand, litigation generally comes with needing to put your deletion policy on hold, and it sounds like that didn't happen here?
  - gameman144 4y ago
    This seems like some insane government overreach, though. Like, make the penalties for destroying evidence super steep and criminally liable sure, but it seems pretty wild that you could be convicted of a crime without evidence. In that case, the government has an incentive to destroy evidence and its paper trail.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      How would the government go about destroying evidence in a defendant's possession? (If you mean "Has the government failed to meet its burden of disclosure regarding evidence in its possession:" yes, it occasionally happens. The significant incentive against it is that it's immediate grounds for a mistrial and incredibly embarrassing to a prosecutor's office that has it happen on their watch).
    - hugh-avherald 4y ago
      I don't want to alarm you but (a) it's definitely possible to be convicted of a crime without evidence and (b) the only things stopping "the government" fabricating evidence are the government officials themselves.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
cowmoo728 4y ago
It's very annoying. I regularly get a technical question from someone and answer it in a detailed back and forth where we debug. Then I realize history was off, turn history on, and then copy paste hundreds of lines of conversation back into the same chat window so it doesn't disappear in 24 hours.
ahh 4y ago
God, do I love working in the finance industry some times.
hdhejenennd 4y ago
One of many completely dysfunctional things I hated in my short stint there not long ago. Just an incredibly employee-hostile setting for doing remote work.
crazygringo 4y ago
And even e-mail has the problem when it's deleted after two years according to retention policy. You have a contact you remember who emailed you three years about a thing... you'll never find them again. I was genuinely shocked to discover how often I needed an email from over two years ago to check on something or someone. Oh well.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > You have a contact you remember who emailed you three years about a thing... you'll never find them again. Same problem. So, I asked the company IT staff, what is the recommended solution? The answer was "oh, just create a folder on your network drive, and drag-and-drop the .MSG files into there." This answer was apparently vetted by the same company lawyers that came up with the 2 year retention policy in the first place. I don't have the courage to confirm this, but I really would like to ask them what the point of all this even is.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    If you make a personal copy it's not in the email system, and they can reasonably say they couldn't find it, since they aren't going to search everyone's desktops for errant emails.
    - znep 4y ago
      Even Google can't solve all the downsides of things being in the cloud.
  - eep_social 4y ago
    I understood that the goal is to reduce keyword hits during discovery therefore making the action active rather than passive is a favorable balance of concerns.
raldi 4y ago
I was working there when this happened, and I definitely remember thinking, "Well, no point in writing a detailed email full of information that will be useful in the future, because in 30 days it'll be gone anyway." Even more frustrating was finding myself in a situation where I remembered an old email that would be enormously helpful, either because of the information in it, or because I could reuse the bulk of something I had invested a lot of effort into writing, and knowing that this work was gone forever.
- telotortium 4y ago
  I always added all emails to me or cc me to the Indef label, which stops the email autodeletion.
  - raldi 4y ago
    I tried that for a while, but eventually got a message from someone nose-bleedingly high up along the lines of, “If you’re reading this, you’re one of a very small number of employees who has marked more than X% of their mail as retain-indefinitely.” It was obvious they were reluctant to go on record telling us to knock it off, but that was the clear implication.
    - telotortium 4y ago
      Huh, TIL. When did this happen? I left in January 2022. Also, perhaps the amount of mailing lists I was subscribed to (the messages of which I didn't retain unless they mentioned me) outweighed the messages that mentioned me. I could see running into an issue if you retained literally every message in your inbox.
- netheril96 4y ago
  Email are retained for more than a year. Only instant chats are retained for 24h or 30d.
  - anthlax 4y ago

by jefftk 4y ago

shadowgovt 4y ago

I don't have a horse in this race (anymore), but in the abstract I would love if government aligned incentives so that it was more painful for companies to toss records that should have been retained than to retain records that are damaging to them in hindsight, which they were legally allowed at some point to toss. For precisely the reason you indicated.

ROTMetro 4y ago
Then companies will just get rid of chat tools because informal discussions can be turned to fit any narrative. 'wow, Bob picked the worst possible way to solve xyz' negligence, knowingly having incompetent developers. You yourself said Bob's solutions were the worst possible. 'looking back, we should have implemented XYZ differently but we are stuck with that implementation now' can be about something harmless but blown so out of proportion in court.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  This site is crazy. I get downvoted for posting insurance company training regarding chat and get downvoted. I guess you all just run a company without worrying about having insurance? Are you people who downvoted in IT and the liaison with the insurance company?
- wpietri 4y ago
  Companies can't get rid of chat tools anymore than previous bureaucracies could stop using paper. Operating at current scale requires digital communication. If they tried to cut that off, they'd discover that things stopped working. Twitter gave us an example of that just this week: https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musks-twitter https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musk...
  - bluGill 4y ago
    True, but saving paper was a lot more work. Most paper memos got read and put into the trash as you didn't have space to save it. Even if there wasn't a review everything saved policy you still did just because it was sitting in your office until you got rid of it. Of course when something did have to be saved you gave it to your secretary to file and wouldn't review it latter to see if it should go, but if it stayed in your office it didn't last much longer than you needed it.
  - andromeduck 4y ago
    People can just voice/video call and write memos.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Can they? I mean, I grant the theoretical possibility. In the same way that they could in theory only meet in person. But I just provided you with a counterexample of that not actually happening. The reason people use things like Slack is because they're way more efficient than setting up meetings to discuss things. So I think in the long term, a company like Google ruling out chat would be significantly handicapped vs their competitors in terms of information flow, response time, and ability to iterate.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      Paper records like memos are subject to evidence preservation rules as well.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > can be about something harmless but blown so out of proportion in court. That's the entire point of a court, to find correct context and proportion. Judges are not idiots and they don't like being mislead. If you blow things out of proportion, and your opponents can put up a counterargument, it will cost you.
jeremyjh 4y ago
Just let the plaintiff or prosecuter decide what evidence they would have liked to find and instruct the jury to assume it was found. This would never happen again anywhere.
- jefftk 4y ago
  The issue here is that companies are not generally required to retain a records indefinitely, and if something was deleted as part of a standard retention policy (instead of specifically because of its contents) the normal "assume the worst" policy doesn't apply. Which is, I think, why lawyers are excited about a default of having a short retention period. On the other hand, litigation generally comes with needing to put your deletion policy on hold, and it sounds like that didn't happen here?
- gameman144 4y ago
  This seems like some insane government overreach, though. Like, make the penalties for destroying evidence super steep and criminally liable sure, but it seems pretty wild that you could be convicted of a crime without evidence. In that case, the government has an incentive to destroy evidence and its paper trail.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    How would the government go about destroying evidence in a defendant's possession? (If you mean "Has the government failed to meet its burden of disclosure regarding evidence in its possession:" yes, it occasionally happens. The significant incentive against it is that it's immediate grounds for a mistrial and incredibly embarrassing to a prosecutor's office that has it happen on their watch).
  - hugh-avherald 4y ago
    I don't want to alarm you but (a) it's definitely possible to be convicted of a crime without evidence and (b) the only things stopping "the government" fabricating evidence are the government officials themselves.
- dragonwriter 4y ago

cowmoo728 4y ago

It's very annoying. I regularly get a technical question from someone and answer it in a detailed back and forth where we debug. Then I realize history was off, turn history on, and then copy paste hundreds of lines of conversation back into the same chat window so it doesn't disappear in 24 hours.

ahh 4y ago

God, do I love working in the finance industry some times.

hdhejenennd 4y ago

One of many completely dysfunctional things I hated in my short stint there not long ago. Just an incredibly employee-hostile setting for doing remote work.

crazygringo 4y ago

And even e-mail has the problem when it's deleted after two years according to retention policy. You have a contact you remember who emailed you three years about a thing... you'll never find them again. I was genuinely shocked to discover how often I needed an email from over two years ago to check on something or someone. Oh well.

akira2501 4y ago
> You have a contact you remember who emailed you three years about a thing... you'll never find them again. Same problem. So, I asked the company IT staff, what is the recommended solution? The answer was "oh, just create a folder on your network drive, and drag-and-drop the .MSG files into there." This answer was apparently vetted by the same company lawyers that came up with the 2 year retention policy in the first place. I don't have the courage to confirm this, but I really would like to ask them what the point of all this even is.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  If you make a personal copy it's not in the email system, and they can reasonably say they couldn't find it, since they aren't going to search everyone's desktops for errant emails.
  - znep 4y ago
    Even Google can't solve all the downsides of things being in the cloud.
- eep_social 4y ago
  I understood that the goal is to reduce keyword hits during discovery therefore making the action active rather than passive is a favorable balance of concerns.

raldi 4y ago

I was working there when this happened, and I definitely remember thinking, "Well, no point in writing a detailed email full of information that will be useful in the future, because in 30 days it'll be gone anyway." Even more frustrating was finding myself in a situation where I remembered an old email that would be enormously helpful, either because of the information in it, or because I could reuse the bulk of something I had invested a lot of effort into writing, and knowing that this work was gone forever.

telotortium 4y ago
I always added all emails to me or cc me to the Indef label, which stops the email autodeletion.
- raldi 4y ago
  I tried that for a while, but eventually got a message from someone nose-bleedingly high up along the lines of, “If you’re reading this, you’re one of a very small number of employees who has marked more than X% of their mail as retain-indefinitely.” It was obvious they were reluctant to go on record telling us to knock it off, but that was the clear implication.
  - telotortium 4y ago
    Huh, TIL. When did this happen? I left in January 2022. Also, perhaps the amount of mailing lists I was subscribed to (the messages of which I didn't retain unless they mentioned me) outweighed the messages that mentioned me. I could see running into an issue if you retained literally every message in your inbox.
netheril96 4y ago
Email are retained for more than a year. Only instant chats are retained for 24h or 30d.
- anthlax 4y ago